Guest Lecture by Dr. Mark Laver, University of Guelph

Co-Sponsored by WLU’s Faculty of Music and Department of Political Science.

Jazz music’s status as a uniquely American cultural practice is rarely questioned, but is nonetheless continually reaffirmed. Speaking in Ken Burns’s 2000 miniseries, Jazz, Wynton Marsalis explained, “Jazz music objectifies America. It’s an art form that can give us a peerless way of understanding ourselves.” Crucial to the American nationalistic discourse of jazz is the metaphor of freedom. For example, numerous African American cultural critics have read jazz against the backdrop of slavery and oppression, understanding the music as an aestheticized practice of freedom. At the same time, several generations of American governments have also drawn on the freedom metaphor, linking jazz to neoliberal democracy. Jazz’s status as America’s music runs deeper than mere indigeneity: through the discourse of freedom, jazz has been knitted into the fabric of American culture, civic society, and politics.

In this lecture, Dr. Mark Laver considers the Jazz at the Lincoln Center (J@LC) program as an institution that sutures these official and unofficial jazz-freedom discourses. In the coming months, J@LC will be opening a new jazz palace in the St. Regis Hotel in Doha, Qatar. J@LC Doha will be the first high profile jazz club in the Middle East, and will be the first in a series of four J@LC/St. Regis venues in Europe and Asia scheduled to open over the next five years. Dr. Laver proposes that the case of J@LC Doha shows us exactly how free market economics and jazz-based American cultural imperialism have become increasingly inseparable. The lynchpin here – as it has been throughout so much of the history of jazz music – remains the idea of freedom.